McCain's Convention Bounce Essentially Gone

[HappySqurriel]

cwbys21 said:

The Ghost of RubangB said:

Also, the electoral vote is redistrubted once every 10 years, so every 10 years California is way behind in electoral power.  The population (and thus % of popular vote) here grows insanely fast, but our % of electoral vote grows super slow in big steps decades apart.  At any given election, your vote in Ohio is worth more than my vote in California.  Not to mention that the Electoral College mandates that campaigns only care about swing states.

And Ross Perot got 18.9% of the popular vote in 1992!!!  Then 8.8% in 1996.  Either way, the electoral college has become a scam that keeps us stuck with a 2 party system and makes the popular vote meaningless.  It's a good way to distribute Congressmen and Senators, sure, but they don't need to re-calculate votes based on those numbers anymore.

 

Yes it does keep us stuck with a 2 party system, but that would have to change from the state level I believe.  They decide how they will cast their votes in the Electoral College, not by Federal rules.  The Feds only say how many votes each state gets, otherwise why would anyone in states like Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, North or Sout Dakota go to the polls?  The blue states have the most people and if it was purely by popular vote then everything else wouldn't matter because the smaller population states would have no effect on who was president and you would have a lot of very angry people.  In fact those states and others in the mid west might leave the union because they wouldn't be fairly represented.

 

Yeah, the American system has many checks and balances to prevent a tyranny of the majority and does (about) as well as you can if you're electing a single individual to an executive position. Now, it would be interesting to see what would happen if you used proportionate representation to vote for an executive branch that worked like a board of directors ... I suspect that it would be more representative of the views of the public, but that also means that it would (probably) be stuck in a constant dead-lock.